As the polls began to close Tuesday, the president’s most vociferous supporters on the far right began to reckon with the prospect of a fearsome new reality: a Democratic House, empowered to launch ceaseless investigations, subpoena Trump associates, and perhaps even file articles of impeachment. “There may be an attempt to impeach, because the base demands it from the Democrats at this point,” predicted Ben Shapiro, the perpetually consternated editor-in-chief of the Daily Wire. “They’ve been talking about how Trump is Hitler. And if Trump is Hitler, you’re gonna sort of have to get rid of him.”

Those fears are hardly unfounded. Since Donald Trump took office, in early 2017, congressional Democrats have called for legislative inquiries into myriad alleged misdeeds. They could, for example, subpoena Trump’s tax returns, extract testimony from people involved in the Russia probe, and initiate dozens of committee investigations—into White House cyber-security practices, Trump’s firing of U.S. attorneys, alleged political interference at the State Department, Jared Kushner’s dubious ethics-law compliance, the administration’s botched response to Hurricane Maria, and on and on. Impeachment isn’t off the table, either, especially if Robert Mueller gives them reason. When two rogue congressmen attempted to file articles of impeachment last year, Nancy Pelosi and Democratic leadership shot them down, in part to keep their powder dry for this very moment. Now, with the gavel back under Democratic control, the political calculus is much different, even if the wave was not as sweeping as people initially predicted. “It’s still a blue wave, even if not a Point Break–style wave,” a former senior adviser on the Trump campaign told me. “Losing the House, whether by a large or small margin, is huge.”

If the far right is worried about the trouble Democrats may stir up, it is because it is intimately familiar with the damage a vengeful congressional majority can do to punish and obstruct the White House. Rep. Darrell Issa was dogged in his pursuit of the Fast and Furious documents, stretching a minor scandal into a major G.O.P. talking point. Republican-controlled House committees oversaw half a dozen separate investigations into the 2012 Benghazi attack, allowing them to publicly grill Hillary Clinton for more than eight hours. (Rep. Jason Chaffetz, then the Oversight Committee chair, was looking forward to investigating Clinton “for years” over the Benghazi attacks if she won the presidency—alas.) Whatever restraint Democrats might have exercised in a previous era, there will be no partisan goodwill left in Congress by the time Rep. Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the Oversight Committee, takes over from Rep. Trey Gowdy. (“I am not looking for headlines,” Cummings toldThe New York Times in September. “I am going to be defending the truth. We want to look at what is happening under this administration because all of us can agree this is not normal.”)

The sources I spoke with were particularly concerned with the power Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, would have if he takes over from current chairman Devin Nunes. ”Instead of D.O.J. facing pressure from Nunes and the Freedom Caucus, they’ll have free rein,” predicted Jack Posobiec, a correspondent from One America News Network and a prominent pro-Trump personality on Twitter. “Schiff will be going door-to-door with free copies of the Mueller report like a Jehovah’s Witness once it’s out.”

Lee Stranahan, the former White House reporter for Breitbart, now a host on Sputnik Radio, suggested that Chairman Schiff could pick up where Mueller leaves off, should the special counsel complete his investigation without indicting the president. A continued, Democratic House-led investigation, he said, “serves a lot of the same political purposes [as Mueller], which is the ‘death by a thousand cuts’ thing.”

Even so, MAGA-world downplayed the importance of losing the House, given Republican control of the Senate. Especially since so many of Trump’s policy achievements—cutting regulations, moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, withdrawing from the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal—have circumvented the legislative branch. Conservative judicial nominations, which have already been proceeding at a breakneck pace, will continue unabated. “His agenda will founder a little bit, but do I think there will be anything supremely awful for Trump other than just the investigations? Probably not,” said Shapiro, “unless he was planning any sort of big economic push, but he got his tax cuts through already.” Stranahan added that given Trump’s high-profile failures in that chamber, pushing legislation through the House was a lost cause anyways. “It’s not like Trump had a tremendous amount of success with stuff that went through the House apart from the tax thing.”

Ali Alexander, a pro-Trump activist and media celebrity with ties to Bob Mercer, was even less worried, predicting that losing the House might even be a good thing for Trump’s chances in 2020. “You’ll have someone to run against,” he explained, noting that the president thrives when he has an established order to smash. Plus, he added, just as Republicans took hard votes on repealing Obamacare, now Democrats would be the ones in the uncomfortable position of having to make politically difficult, and strategically fraught, legislative decisions leading into the next election cycle. “Every Democrat running against him is going to have to take a position on every bill the House considers.”

And yet, there was a palpable sense of fear that, after two years of wild, Trumpian abandon in Washington, the party might be drawing to an end—with real legal consequences for anyone who might have broken the rules along the way. Everyone I spoke to expressed worry that other Trump associates would soon be swept up in a super-charged Russia witch hunt. The chief target, according to these people: Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son and MAGA idol, who took an infamous 2016 meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer peddling “dirt” on Clinton. “Schiff wants to fuck Jr.,” said Alexander, suggesting that Donny could soon become a prime target of a Democratic-controlled House Intelligence Committee. Posobiec also offered up another name—Roger Stone—though he didn’t expect the inquisition would end there. “Me, Mike Cernovich, and Roger Stone can rent a townhouse across from the House Intel Committee and take turns walking over to explain how we had no connections to [Vladimir] Putin.’”